Top all-time · #13701
Imran's blog
Personal blog · blog.imranghory.orgstartupsbusiness
Imran's blog is a personal blog at blog.imranghory.org about startups and business. Since 2011, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Facebook Ads: The Cheapest Traffic You'll Ever Buy”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The comments link this blog for a post on buying cheap startup traffic with Facebook ads, cited in an Ask HN thread on marketing and a related ethics question. No comment judges the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Imran's blog
Most-linked posts?
- Facebook Ads: The Cheapest Traffic You'll Ever Buy3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-04-04
What Hacker News says?
The problem is that the TC ethics statement doesn't really help. There's too many problems of conflict of interest. I wrote up an article about them prior to Arrington's resignation: http://blog.imranghory.org/michael-arringtons-unsolvable-con...
Comment linking /michael-arringtons-unsolvable-conflict-of-int
on “TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over”Submitted Facebook Ads: The Cheapest Traffic You'll Ever Buy as a story · 183 points
HN discussionNo they don't, and even if they wanted to they can't without it causing further problem (because of startups being in stealth, the disclosure itself giving favourable coverage to the startup). I wrote an article about it here: http://blog.imranghory.org/michael-arringtons-unsolvable-con...
Comment linking /michael-arringtons-unsolvable-conflict-of-int
on “Michael Arrington: Editorial Independence”Submitted How YC S12 Companies Make Money as a story · 64 points
HN discussionTechcrunch is somewhat behind the curve here, ever since IBM started undercutting RedHat on support and stealing their customers open source companies have stepped away from having consultancy as their only form of revenue. Modern open source based business tend to be about network effect and building ecosystem business (Android, Github, Docker). (I wrote a blog post on this a while back http://blog.imranghory.org/o…
Comment linking /open-source-business-models
on “Why Open Source Startups Fail”Submitted What happened to Hacker News as a story · 57 points
HN discussionI wrote a piece on open source business models that you might find useful: http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business-models The big risk with your suggested approach is that you have no defensibility as there's nothing stopping someone else offering a hosted version of your software. Because of this it's hard to maintain the high-margins typically required to grow a software businesses. Open sourcing your prod…
Comment linking /open-source-business-models
on “Ask HN: Is it foolish to open source your SAAS business source code?”Submitted Going Through Multiple Accelerators: The Data Might Surprise You as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI wrote up an article a while back on open-source business models for startups which you might find interesting: http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business-models (although it focuses on startups and not so much lifestyle businesses where other business models are also viable)
Comment linking /open-source-business-models
on “Ask HN: How would you sell open source software?”Submitted The Rise of Specialist YC competitors as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI'm assuming that this is the article you're talking about: http://blog.imranghory.org/facebook-ads-the-cheapest-traffic... Sounds like you have to decide which is more important to you: your startup or the veracity of your article. Facebook doing a case study on your startup could be great. If you're worried that it will look like your article was written dishonestly then you could always withdraw the article or gi…
Comment linking /facebook-ads-the-cheapest-traffic-youll-ever
on “Ask HN: Ethics question ”Submitted User Acquisition Advice for Startups as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThank you HN, I may have an answer: http://blog.imranghory.org/facebook-ads-the-cheapest-traffic...
Comment linking /facebook-ads-the-cheapest-traffic-youll-ever
on “Ask HN: How do I improve marketing without being a domain expert?”Submitted Markets for Marketplaces: Future Disruption as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Applying to AngelPad as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Marketplace Pricing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Seed Stage VCs in London as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Seedhack Missed Its Mark as a story · 1 points
HN discussion